


loving her is red

by boleynhowards



Category: Six - Marlow/Moss
Genre: F/F, Soulmate AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 07:03:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28559526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boleynhowards/pseuds/boleynhowards
Summary: Pink has always been Katherine Howard’s favourite colour, but she never saw red until today.(a soulmate au in which every person’s soul has a designated colour, and you’re blind to the colour assigned to your soulmate until you meet them for the first time.)
Relationships: Anne of Cleves/Katherine Howard, referenced parrlyn
Comments: 4
Kudos: 53





	loving her is red

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to my lovely german gf @theothercatherine for choosing the pet name for me so i didn’t have to risk getting a horrible translation error x
> 
> also thank you miss taylor swift for the title (although the fic has nothing to do with the song, i stole the lyric because it fits)

From the moment a person is born, a few things are recorded about them. Their sex, their weight, their name if it’s already been decided. And then there’s the soul colour. It’s reserved a space on everybody’s birth certificates, and arguably it’s the one piece of information that the general population cares about the most.

A soul colour is self explanatory; it’s said to be a window into a person’s soul. There are a few different colours a person’s soul can be, but even people with matching colours show great variety in personality. In fact, there’s no room for stereotypes, because each colour holds a different meaning for everyone. Some people with a yellow soul are bright and sunny, just as the colour suggests, whilst others are headstrong and stubborn to a fault. Many people write grey off as a boring colour to have, but those with a grey soul can be the most expressive personalities or be the backbones of their families. It truly does depend from person to person.

Soul colours almost sound useless. If they don’t give any consistent insight into a person, then why do people even give them a second thought?

The answer is simple. A person isn’t born being able to see every single colour. They  _ almost  _ can but, unchangeably, every single person is always blind to one colour from the moment they’re born. And this colour, it has been observed, is the colour that belongs to the person’s soulmate.

This was what made people so obsessed with the concept. Everybody just wanted to find their soulmate. The endeavours were understandable, and the colour blindness became one of the only things that undeniably bound every single human being together; the one thing everybody had in common. No matter what colour you couldn’t see-- purple, orange, it truly didn’t matter-- there was some sort of place for you. Communities for the colourblind rose up, discussion forums emerged, even fashion was dictated by the phenomenon as everybody scrambled to wear their own colour, so their soulmate could identify them easily.

Katherine Howard was just one of the many people who thought about her soulmate on a regular basis. At least once a day, she allowed her mind to wander off and always found herself lost in a daydream by the end of it. Really though, she couldn’t help herself. Maybe she could be defined as a bit of a hopeless romantic, but with the promise of one day bumping into the person of her dreams, nobody could really blame her.

Kat’s soul was pink. Pink also happened to be her favourite colour. She didn’t just let it dominate her wardrobe; the colour painted itself over her bedsheets, her phone cases and her nails. Even her hair looked like it had been dipped into a pool of the hottest shade of pink after she had decided to dye it that way.

Pink was Kat’s favourite colour because she felt like it encompassed every facet of herself. There was softness in pink rose petals and fuzzy blankets that were gently draped over her while she slept. Her sweetness was encapsulated in the dyes of marshmallows and macaroons, and her energy was the texture of bubblegum and the colour of pomegranate. Then there was the puffiness on her cheeks after spending hours crying and the stickiness of plasticky makeup against her face on an insecure day. Some of it was good, some of it was bad, but all of it was pink. And so, by extension, all of it was Kat.

Like everybody else in the world, Kat was also blind to a colour; red. A lot of people took pity on those who couldn’t see a primary colour, because they tended to be blind to a lot more things than the average person, but Kat just took it as all the more reason to be excited for the day she finally met her soulmate. One day, cherries and strawberries and certain apples would look as good as they tasted. She would finally be able to see her cousin’s signature shade of lipstick and actually recognise the first stripe of the rainbow.

How she longed for that day. In the time she was going to spend waiting to see the iconic colour for herself, Kat decided to do her own research on what the colour meant. She wanted to know everything; connotations, the names of the different shades, associations, even celebrities and public figures who had it as their own too. It was one of the only things she could do to satisfy her curiosity and impatience.

Unfortunately, digging too deep online can bring difficult consequences just as easily as it can bring helpful answers. That was something Kat learnt the hard way, after stumbling across a forum of people who, for whatever reason, didn’t like the colour red. A thread of comments were written across her screen, and by the time she had read them all it was too late to click off and forget about them.

Each commenter was saying basically the same thing, and every single one of them agreed with one another in their responses. Apparently, red was a violent, angry colour. Red meant bloodthirst and aggression, the instillation of danger and stress. Some commenters on the thread were jokingly giving empathy out to people who had landed a red soulmate, wishing them luck and telling them not to get murdered on the first date. Before she could click away, Kat had already read too much, and fear and doubt surged through her.

Was she really as unlucky as the people online were saying? Had she ended up with a bad soulmate? Kat had been so excited to meet them, but now she was beginning to have second thoughts. Luckily, she had her cousin there to help. As soon as Anne caught on to the sudden fear of the colour red, it was quick for her to figure out what had happened, and so she began to tell Kat her own explanation of the colour.

Anne spent hours telling Kat all about it. Kat learnt about the regality of ruby gemstones and explained that the reason she layered her lips in it every day was because of the confidence the colour gave her. Then there were the softer aspects of red, like the protective skin of an apple, the delicate wings of a ladybug or the steady beat of a heart filled with love. The careful descriptions slowly began to reignite Kat’s faith in the colour she hadn’t even seen.

“But what about the people online?” She asked on an unsure day. “The ones who say it’s a bad colour?”

“Well, every colour has negative connotations, doesn’t it?”

“I guess.”

“Think about it for me, Kit. Some people say that green is an envious colour. That it’s materialistic and selfish, right? But do you think I’m a bad person?”

“No.” Kat dutifully shook her head. “I love you.”

“Exactly.” Anne hummed with satisfaction. “There’s flaws in every colour, just like there’s flaws in every person. It doesn’t make either of them less beautiful. You’re going to fall unconditionally in love with red when you see it, just like you’ll fall unconditionally in love with your soulmate.”

Kat was always left with a dreamy smile on her face when they spoke about that together.

In return, she told Anne all about the colour blue. It was the one that Anne was blind to, and Kat did the best she possibly could to describe what it was. Although it was hard to capture, she really did try to explain the calmness of a still ocean, the wisdom of a flowing river and even the electricity of bright thunder as it clapped through a charcoal night. The cousins often found themselves laying awake at night, talking back and forth and telling each other all about the colours they couldn’t see, wishing for the day that their palette completed itself. It was a ritual for them both.

Until it wasn’t. One day, while Kat had decided to stay inside and spend a lazy day sprawled over the sofa playing on her Switch, Anne had decided to go out and stretch her legs. When she returned home later that night, there was a certain excitement radiating off of her that told everything Kat needed to know before Anne even explained it to her.

She had found her soulmate. For hours, Anne and Kat sat together and Anne explained everything. How she was strolling through the park and caught sight of a random girl sitting on the bench, head in a book, and suddenly there was  _ blue.  _ The sky, that she had only ever seen in orangey sunsets and purplish nighttimes, morphed from a slightly void and slowly inked into brilliant cerulean. Bluebells and cornflowers that were perched among the blades of grass suddenly seemed to pop out of hiding, and even the denim jeans of random passersby were highlighted against the environment. Anne wasted no time in walking up to the girl who sat reading, and from there everything just fell into place.

They talked about the colour blue for what must have been the thousandth time, but this was the first time that Anne finally understood, now she could see it for herself. Anne also told Kat as much as she could about her soulmate, and she had learnt a surprising amount in just a few hours. By the sounds of it, Anne was already planning her future with this girl, and all Kat could feel was happiness for her older cousin. After years of waiting for this moment to come, Anne deserved this day.

But Anne didn’t need to know what the colour blue looked like anymore. She didn’t need to fantasise about her soulmate now she had already met her. And so, Kat silently watched as their almost daily conversations about red and blue turned shorter and more infrequent by the day, until they barely even had them anymore. She hated having the thoughts, feeling nothing but joy and gratitude now that Anne was happy, but some tiny part of Kat longed for the days where she still had somebody to talk to about it all. But she supposed that was a luxury she just didn’t have anymore.

As much as she didn’t like to be, the more days that went by, the more frustrated Kat was beginning to get. Around her, it felt like everybody had met their soulmate. Everyone else except for her could see the world in all of its vibrancy, and they could share it hand in hand with the one that was for them. But she was still missing out, not having found her soulmate yet, and it felt like she was locked out of some elite level of society until she could actually see the colour red.

Still, Kat tried her best to keep her cool. She knew that it was a matter of  _ when  _ and not  _ if _ , and that she just had to leave the universe to its own devices and it would eventually bring her and her soulmate together when the time was right. So, despite her impatience and yearning, she put her head down and tried to focus on her studies.

After finally finishing a piece of coursework for her music class, Kat filed it away to hand in during her next lesson and leant over her desk to reach for her bag. She fumbled around in there, growing confused when her fingers didn’t automatically land on her history textbook ready for her next assignment, and so ducked her head down for a better look. Then it hit her; she had left the book back at the classroom.

Frustration surged up inside of her. She had barely managed to motivate herself to complete her work today, and the thought of walking across town and to her campus just to pick up the book was one she didn’t like. And yet she knew she had to, so Kat begrudgingly rose to her feet and sauntered to her wardrobe, searching the rail for her pink jacket but not finding it anywhere.

Great. Now her favourite jacket was missing, along with her history textbook stranded across town when she needed it. Grumbling, Kat stormed over to Anne’s room and walked straight in, fishing up one of the green flannels she had strewn over her messy bedroom floor and throwing that over herself instead. She knew Anne wouldn’t mind.

It was no lie to say Kat was in a bad mood as she left the house. Everything was just piling up against her. Classwork, having to walk to university on her one day off because she stupidly forgot to grab her textbook on the way out of class, her favourite pink jacket going missing, and, of course, her lack of soulmate. It was all starting to become too much to handle.

Determined to get home quickly, Kat sped through the streets with her head down. She paid no mind to what was going on around her, only looking up when she had to cross the road. That was probably why she found herself colliding straight into another person who was walking the opposite direction. Just to make her day  _ that  _ much better.

Kat didn’t consider herself an angry person. In fact, she was quite the opposite. She hated confrontation. But this was a stranger she was never going to see again and, even if it might have been her fault for not looking where she was going, she was too caught up with her annoyance at everything going on right now to care. Curse words began to form in her throat, and she was about ready to throw them at the stranger, along with all of her day’s anger, but before they escaped her lips she finally let her eyes look up to meet the person.

She choked on the words as she swallowed them back down.

Before, Kat had insisted that she didn’t have a type. Now, she was sure that her type was everything that this girl was. They were around the same age, give or take a few years. She was slightly taller than Kat, but only by a few inches. Her skin was dark and her eyes were the colour of chestnut, with the sun beating down on them making them look like honey. An aura of confidence seemed to swirl around her, along with spirals of nonchalance and coolness.

But, above all of that, there was one thing that staggered Kat the most; the hoodie that clung to the girl’s skin. It definitely stood out the most, the thick fabric being a snug fit that complimented her figure, but that wasn’t what made Kat gawk.

“ _ Red _ .”

It was the only word that Kat could muster, because it was the only thing she could see.

Vibrant, bright, brilliant red. It exploded in her face, stole her gaze more than anything else had ever done in her life, and Kat was sure she could stand her forever and take in the colour. Red. Red, red, red. Words didn’t come to Kat, simply standing speechless and unmoving. Her mind travelled back to the nights spent in with Anne, the detailed explanations of the colour, and suddenly it all made sense.

Red was elegance and royalty. It was wine perfectly poured into an ornate goblet and shared between party guests. Red was the sudden pop of freedom, the colour of blooming poppies sprouting from war ridden meadows. Red was comfort and protection, like the mittens and scarf that clung to her hands and neck during the winter and months. Red was romance and life and falling in love, just as it was the colour of wedding carnations and blood’s livelihood.

Although Kat was in complete and utter stupor, her soulmate looked on with obliviousness etched into her features.

“Uh, yeah.”

Her voice was smooth, and Kat sensed a little raspiness among the confusion. If she wasn’t so panicked, she might have spent longer dwelling on it, but her mind had other ideas as she hung her head and checked her own outfit.

Fuck. Her clothes were a mismatched mess, considering she hadn’t been planning on even leaving the house today. A white shirt was tucked into her blue denim jeans, and over that hung the green flannel that she had stolen from Anne’s room. Of all the days she had gone out without wearing a single article of pink, it had to have been this one.

Kat knew she had to speak, and so she began to say the first thing that came to mind.

“Pink. It’s… it’s your soulmate colour, isn’t it?”

A flash of realisation spread across her soulmate’s face, and Kat knew she had hit the jackpot.

“You’re- it’s you?”

“Yes!” Kat hurriedly nodded, excitement sparking her tone. “I’m your soulmate! I’m sorry I’m not wearing pink right now, I normally do. Today’s the only day that I’m not. My pink jacket I normally wear out went missing and I didn’t expect to bump into you today, but I swear it’s me. Wait, I have this-”

Whipping her head to the side, Kat let her ponytail fly to the front of her face, allowing her soulmate to see the hot pink dye that streaked her hair. Absolute shock and wonder dawned itself onto her features all at once, and Kat’s heart skipped a beat as she watched it happen. She herself curiously pondered what sort of thoughts were rushing through her soulmate’s mind.

Did her soulmate have someone who she daydreamed about this moment with? Was this the day they had both been anxiously waiting for? Were they going to start a life together straight off the bat?

So many unspoken questions flittered and Kat’s mind, and she didn’t know which one to ask first. It was finally her soulmate who spoke, and she seemed to take the calmer initiative.

“Do you want to go somewhere less busy than here and talk?”

Looking around, Kat decided that was the best idea. Much better than standing in the middle of a street, anyway. So, abandoning all plans to go and fetch her history textbook from her classroom, Kat nodded in agreement and found herself following her soulmate away from the bedlam of the town square. As they walked, Kat frantically looked around in every direction, desperate to catch every sight of red she possibly could. After years of missing out on it, she could finally see it all; people’s red t-shirts, the sleek look of red sports cars rolling by. One person had even dyed their hair the colour.

Kat loved it all.

Eventually, they arrived at the entrance of a small roadside coffee shop, and both of them mutually decided to duck inside. Kat looked around, taking note of the dark red padding across the seats and wondering if her soulmate had caught sight of the pink milkshake one of the other customers was sipping at. It was all just so much to take in.

Neither of them wasted time placing an order just yet, both much too eager to get to know each other and see every new thing first, and so they slid into one of the corner most booths and looked across at one another with expressions of matching eagerness and excitement.

“So, what’s your name?” Her soulmate asked now that they were finally able to speak properly. “I’m Anna.”

_ Anna _ . Kat repeated it in her head. Two syllables, four letters. It was short, snappy and sweet. She knew nothing about her soulmate, but decided that the name definitely fit.

“I’m Kat.” She coolly responded, though she was unable to hide the smile on her face.

“I like the name.” Anna said before continuing into a thought they were both clearly having. “I’m so glad we finally met.”

“Me too.”

Across the span of a few hours, Kat learnt many things about Anna. She was right in guessing that they were the same age, with Anna having recently moved into the area from Germany and still debating whether or not she should transfer to the local university. Her soulmate was an extrovert who had been secretly waiting for this moment to come for years now.

Kat told Anna about her favourite things to do; gaming, drawing, playing music, and she learnt that Anna liked to game too, as well as be willing to dance to any song that Kat could play. She found out that Anna was an active person, liking to wake up early and bring her two twin dogs out to run with her before the streets got busy with school goers and work commuters. Kat was playfully frustrated to hear that Anna was tempted to bring the dogs with her out today but ultimately decided against it, but joked that it was for the best; meeting her soulmate and two adorable dogs at once might have just been enough to overload Kat with too much happy emotion.

Everything felt so natural while Kat spoke to Anna, as if every decision she ever made and every step she ever took and every thought she ever had had all been building up for this moment to come. Kat knew that, if everything else in her life turned upside down, Anna was always going to be consistent. That felt like a lot to confidently say about someone she had just met, but Kat had never been so sure about something. Perhaps that was just one of the indescribable notions of knowing when you had met your soulmate.

They sat there for hours, forgetting about the world as it carried on around them. People walked in and out the shop, passing by the outside window, but they both stayed in their booth, ordering a new drink every hour so they weren’t kicked out. Kat hadn’t even taken her phone, thinking she was only going to be out for twenty minutes at the most, and so she didn’t even know if she was being blown up with texts. But that thought didn’t matter right now. She could explain later. Only Anna was on her mind.

Blue skies eventually began to darken, and they both watched it happen together. Tears pooled into Kat’s eyes as she finally got to see the reddish hues of a perfect sunset over a city skyline, and Anna just threw a comforting arm around her for support. As the moon rose up and the streetlamps flickered on to reveal an empty city street, Kat and Anna knew that they didn’t have much time left before the shop closed. Having paid for everything as they purchased it, Anna dropped a few coins into the tip box as they walked out of the coffee shop and back outside.

“I’m so glad we got to have this day.” Kat said, wiping her eyes as they stepped back onto the street.

Chilling breeze pecked at the thread of her flannel, and Kat huddled the fabric even closer. God, she really missed that pink jacket right now.

“Me too, Prinzessin.” Anna smiled, taking both of Kat’s hands and giving them a light squeeze. “But it won’t be our last. You have my number, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Kat nodded with a tiny smile of her own. “Prinzessin?”

“Princess.” Anna defined, her smile turning a little sheepish but Kat’s heart just skipped a beat. “German.”

“It’s cute.”

“You’re cute. Do you want me to walk you home? It’s dark.”

“I live, like, two minutes away.”

“I’ll walk you to the end of your street then.”

“Alright.”

Kat had known Anna for barely half a day, but she already knew that she wanted to spend the rest of forever with her. But a few extra minutes while she got walked home would be enough for right now. After all, she still had to explain to Anne everything that had happened today. And probably apologise for going missing without explanation for a good few hours.

Oh well. She was sure Anne would understand. There was nothing quite like meeting your soulmate; phones and reminders just became trivial distractions in the way of what the universe was pulling you towards.

And so, as she walked back through the front door and was bombarded with half a million concerned questions from a worried Anne, Kat just shook her head and looked up at her older cousin with a starry eyed smile. Just like before, when the roles had been reversed, Anne seemed to have already caught on just by the look on her face.

“Let’s just say,” Kat began, “that red is my new favourite colour.”


End file.
